A dispute between an English local council and the newspaper that covers it shows how press limits are spreading to places once thought immune.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/how-democracies-are-restricting-press-freedom-around-the-world

Posted by bloomberg

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  1. *Rosalind Mathieson for Bloomberg News*

    On the surface, it was a petty dispute, a fight between a local news outlet and a council official in the English county of Nottinghamshire, a region of rolling green fields and tangled forests best known as home to Robin Hood.

    Council leader Mick Barton of the right-wing Reform UK party took umbrage with the Nottingham Post over an article in August that suggested a split in his party’s ranks. Barton froze out the Post: The council stopped sending press releases to the paper’s reporters or inviting them to events, and Reform councilors were banned from talking to the Post at all.

    For a while, the fight threatened to boil over. The Post and its owners defended their coverage and sought legal advice, while Reform’s national deputy leader, Richard Tice, took to UK television to give his side. “That’s the whole point of a democracy,” Tice told Sky News. “You pick and choose who you speak to.”

    This matter may seem parochial, but it points to something bigger — the creeping normalization of media restrictions in advanced democracies. In many parts of the world where press freedom was once taken for granted, the media is under pressure, thanks in part to declining trust among the public, the rise of social media, and politicians looking to bar reporters from asking difficult questions.

    [Read the full essay here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/how-democracies-are-restricting-press-freedom-around-the-world?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2MzcxNjUxMywiZXhwIjoxNzY0MzIxMzEzLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNjJKT1hLR0NURzMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.FyBnSTFF_bowDdCxmmQv4W2xR_Qzf4GU0yJz7UIJWFQ)

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